Vintage Choirs, a sister instrument to Vintage Strings, is coming soon! If you buy Vintage Strings now, you’ll automatically receive a coupon code giving you a 50% discount off Vintage Choirs when it arrives. Check the ReadMe file in your download for full details 🙂

Strings have a unique ability to bring warmth and richness to music: there’s something about dozens of individual players melding into one sweeping soundscape that just seems to lift the hearts of the listeners. Of course, not every rock star is in the position to hire the London Philharmonic to score their album; hence the rise of the string synth – which replaces dozens of individual players with dozens of detuned oscillators to approximate the same richness of result. String synths are one of our favourite musical machines – and Vintage Strings is a homage to them.

At its core, Vintage Strings has both acoustic real-world string samplesand electric string synth oscillators. You blend the two to your own taste using the Levels controls in the centre of the panel. You’ve also got a fully-functional LFO, control over tube saturation, and a gentle low-pass filter to adjust the tone of your hybrid string section. So far so good.

Where things get more interesting, though, is with the two signature controls: Complexity and Vintage. Complexity dials in further electronic string components, adding two levels of Jupiter 6 supersaw to the initial Logan String Melody II waves for a thicker, warmer sound (which you can take still further by detuning it a little).

Vintage, meanwhile, is an unmissable chunky knob in its own little area, and cranking this changes the whole character of the instrument – from clean and clear through to dusty, crusty and erratic, taking in all manner of battered instability along the way. With Vintage at its minimum, you can use the other controls to sculpt a superb modern string section combining acoustic realism with synth expanse – or stick to one or the other for more precise sounds. But with Vintage at anywhere past the 12 o’clock position, the sound becomes unstable; the clean acoustic string samples are blended with, and then replaced by, vintage tape-based string recordings – while the electronic strings become uneven and compressed and start to lose both high- and low-frequency elements. With Vintage all the way clockwise, the sound is dustily aged and full of crusty oxide, with background crackle and hiss breaking through. It’s pretty awesome.

To put the icing on the cake, we have the Icon Reverb – convolved from our Lexicon PCM70. This adds a wonderful smooth period-appropriate classiness to your string sections, letting them breathe.

Vintage Strings is ideal for dialling up a suitably aged string sound to complement a particular era of music – great if you want strings in the background of your Motown track, for example – or for creating entirely unique string-synth patches which don’t mimic existing instruments but nevertheless sound authentically historic. (If you want to get strings that sound like a Chamberlin, Mellotron or Optigan, but have greater playability or a more defined sound, this may be for you.) Above all it’s intended to be inspiring and easy to use: you can twist a few dials and get something cool, or just hit the Glitch randomisation button and see what the machine throws your way. And all without having to even lift a conductor’s baton 🙂

(All our Kontakt instruments require a full copy of Native Instruments Kontakt v4.2.3 or higher (including all versions of Kontakt 5). Kontakt Player is not supported: instruments will load, but will time out after 15 minutes. See the FAQ for further information.)

3 reviews for Vintage Strings

Rated 5 out of 5

Poesque (verified owner)–10 March 2019

I am strung out on retro. Give me more!

Rated 5 out of 5

bladesguy (verified owner)–1 March 2019

First off, I can’t say enough about how much I love Rhythmic Robot! They embrace creativity, customer service & conscientiousness. Now about Vintage Strings… Instant ideas flowing from this very useful instrument. I had not messed with it 5 mins b4 getting a really cool snapshot. Vintage Strings is dripping with vintage mojo, yet I think useful in many contexts. Thanks Professor & Mongo!

Rated 5 out of 5

michael.topic (verified owner)–20 February 2019

For me, this is a real time saver. I like to blend the sound of string machines or synthetic string pads with sampled strings. It gives the strings a nice sheen and transient, when bowing. Much of the music I make has a 70s or 80s feel to it, so this string sound set is ideal. It saves me opening up several tracks and putting different string-like instruments on them, playing in unison or in octaves. I like how the Vintage knob gives just enough movement to the samples to keep them sonically interesting. The Lexicon reverb impulse responses are very nice on strings too. The best features (in my opinion) are that it saves having to replicate all of this with separate instruments and plug ins and the overall impression of the finished sounds is beautifully redolent of an earlier era. Just the ticket.

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All our Kontakt instruments require a full version of Native InstrumentsKontakt version 4.2.3 or later (all versions of Kontakt 5 are supported). Our stuff will load in Kontakt Player, but only in “demo mode” which times out after 15 minutes. For this reason we strongly recommend that you only buy from us if you have a full version of Kontakt. See the FAQ page for more information.